Somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democrat Party lost its mind. It may always have been headed in this direction, but I’m convinced the Obama years were when that descent really picked up speed. Go back and look at the '80s and '90s, though, and Democrat politics looked almost boringly normal by comparison. Half of what today's Democrats consider a baseline position now would have gotten you laughed out of the room back then.
Leftist comedian Bill Maher made the case that it isn't the elderly lawmakers nominally running Congress who are steering the Democrat Party's lurch toward radicalism. It's their staffers. Maher argued that lawmakers 75 and older, people he compared to residents of a retirement home, don't actually understand intersectionality or the woke policy demands issued in their name. The staffers do. They run the daily operations. They write the talking points. They originate the ideas.
"On the left, just abolish anything that isn't working perfectly: police, prisons, borders, shopping lifestyle laws, the Senate, the Supreme Court, globalize the intifada, tampons in the boys' room," Maher said. "You know, someone is coming up with this CRAZY stuff, and it's not Dick Durbin, age 80. It's the staffers."
He makes an excellent point here. Does anyone think the older establishment Democrats are the ones driving the party toward transgender ideology and open borders? Definitely not. But it’s not external forces pushing the Democrats toward insanity either.
“Hey, memo to Democrats: the call is coming from inside the tent," Maher said, and it's hard to come up with a cleaner way to put it. The radicalism comes from inside the party's own house.
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Maher traced the pattern back to Joe Biden, who ran in 2020 as a single-issue "return to normal" candidate obsessed with "eliminating malarkey," not “intersectional queer theory.”
As Maher put it, "when Joe heard the word trans, he thought of Pontiac." Cute line. Also exactly how Democrats operate. They campaign toward the middle, then govern like they just graduated from a three-week seminar on critical theory.
Obama did it. Biden did it.
"But his administration, that is the kids," Maher said. "They made gender identity the federal government's day-one top concern. They're the ones who told Kamala Harris that the answer to 'Do you support tax-funded sex changes for people in prison?' was ‘f**k yeah.' Instead of, 'You're f*****g kidding.'"
If you’re trying to figure out why our government is so dysfunctional and why the sensible middle never seems to win elections, stop; I’m gonna tell you: it’s because the problem isn’t just the old farts, it’s also the new little shits. pic.twitter.com/APBDAkCBvp
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) August 29, 2026
Maher didn't stop at mockery. He argued that the staffers actually steering the party hold a worldview that excuses, and even celebrates, violence against their political enemies, which is his way of saying the modern left has become the side most comfortable with political violence today. Congress, in his telling, has become a retirement home for the "merciful rest" of aging lawmakers while twenty-somethings with social media accounts write the actual agenda.
Will Democrats take the warning? They can't. They're too beholden to the very radicals Maher is warning them about. So if you think Democrat Party might eventually find its way back to sanity, I think that ship has sailed.
